George Miller Beard
| birth_place = Montville, Connecticut | death_date = | death_place = New York City, New York | death_cause = | nationality = American | citizenship = | education = College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York (MD, 1866) | occupation = neurologist | years_active = | known_for = | relations = | website = | profession = | field = | work_institutions = | specialism = | research_field = | notable_works = | prizes = | child = | module2 = | signature = }} George Miller Beard (May 8, 1839 – January 23, 1883) was an American neurologist who popularized the term neurasthenia, starting around 1869. Biography Beard was born in Montville, Connecticut on May 8, 1839, to Rev. Spencer F. Beard, a Congregational minister, and Lucy A. Leonard. Beard's mother died in 1842 and his father remarried the following year to Mary Ann Fellowes.Notable People from Montville’s Past: Dr. George M. Beard, Neurologist Extraordinaire, Donna Jacobson, 2011. He graduated from Yale College in 1862, and received his medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York in 1866. While still in medical school during the American Civil War, he served as an assistant surgeon in the West Gulf squadron of the United States Navy aboard the gunboat ''New London. After the war and graduation from medical school, he married Elizabeth Ann Alden, of Westville, Connecticut, on December 25, 1866.Dictionary of American Biography Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936. He is remembered best for having defined neurasthenia as a medical condition with symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, headache, impotence, neuralgia and depression, as a result of exhaustion of the central nervous system's energy reserves, which Beard attributed to civilization. Physicians who agreed with Beard associated neurasthenia with the stresses of urbanization and the increasingly competitive business environment. Stated simply, people were attempting to achieve more than their constitution could cope with. Typically this followed a short illness from which the patient was thought to have recovered.A Handbook of Practical Treatment, John H. Musser, M.D. and O. A. Kelly, M.D., 1912. One of the more unusual disorders he studied from 1878 onwards was the exaggerated startle reflex among French-Canadian lumbermen from the Moosehead Lake region of Maine, that came to be known as the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine. If they were startled by a short verbal command, they would carry out the instruction without hesitation, irrespective of the consequences. The studies stimulated further research by the military and Georges Gilles de la Tourette. Beard was also involved extensively with electricity as a medical treatment, and published extensively on the subject. He was a champion of many reforms of psychiatry, and was a founder of the National Association for the Protection of the Insane and the Prevention of Insanity. He also took an unpopular stance against the death penalty for persons with mental illness, going so far as to campaign for leniency for Charles J. Guiteau, the assassin of President James Garfield on the basis that the man was not guilty because of insanity. Beard became involved with Thomas Edison's claim to be able to project electrical influence without current through etheric force. As explained in a biography of Edison: :Although in later years Edison even transferred credit to Beard for inventing the term "etheric force", in fact the good doctor suggested the Greek apolia as a more accurate description, "given", he observed, "that the want of polarity is the leading fact of it...¶ This assertion became the informing theme of Beard’s major twenty-eight page, illustrated essay, "Experiments with the Alleged New Force", in the November number of the Archives of Electrology and Neurology. The article was subsequently published in the form of an extended letter to the editor of the New York Daily Tribune, December 9, 1875, as "Mr. Edison’s 'New Force': Result of Physiological and Other Experiments – Characteristics of the Alleged Force – The Apparatus Used", and later in its most definitive form in the January 22 Scientific American, "The Nature of the Newly Discovered Force".Niel Baldwin (2001) Edison: Inventing the Century, pages 64,5, University of Chicago Press He described the force as "somewhere between light and heat on the one hand and magnetism and electricity on the other, with some features of all these forces." Beard died on January 23, 1883 in New York City.Almanac of Famous People, 8th ed. Gale Group, 2003. Skepticism Beard was a critic of claims of the paranormal and spiritualism which he wrote was one of history's greatest delusions.Caplan, Eric. (2011). Mind Games: American Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy. University of California Press. p. 187 He published articles on anomalistic psychology such as The Psychology of Spiritism (1879) exposing the fraud of mediumship and describing its psychological basis.Beard, George Miller. (1879). [https://www.jstor.org/stable/25100777 The Psychology of Spiritism]. The North American Review, Vol. 129, No. 272, pp. 65-80. The term "muscle reading" was coined in the 1870s by Beard to describe the methods of the mentalist J. Randall Brown.During, Simon. (2004). Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Harvard University Press. p. 162. Publications *''The Medical Use of Electricity'' (1867) *[https://archive.org/details/ourhomephysician00bear Our Home Physician] (1869) *''Stimulants and Narcotics: Medically, Philosophically, and Morally Considered'' (1871) *[https://archive.org/details/39002011127108.med.yale.edu Cases of Hysteria, Neurasthenia, Spinal Irritation, or Allied Affections] (1874) *''Medical and Surgical Cases Treated by Electricity'' (1874) * Archives of Electrology and Neurology, volumes 1 & 2 (1874,5) via HathiTrust * [https://archive.org/details/journalnervousa10neurgoog "A New Theory of Trance and its Bearings on Human Testimony", Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Vol.4, No.1, (January 1877), pp.1-47.] * "Physiology of Mind-Reading", The Popular Science Monthly, Vol.10, (February 1877), pp.459-473. * "Mind-Reading by the Ear", The Popular Science Monthly, Vol.11, (July 1877), pp.362-363. *[https://archive.org/details/practicaltreatis00bear A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia): Its Symptoms, Nature, Sequences, Treatment] (1880) *''A Practical Treatise on Sea-Sickness'' (1881) *[https://ia801401.us.archive.org/7/items/americannervousn00bearuoft/americannervousn00bearuoft.pdf American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences] (1881) *[https://archive.org/details/psychologyofsale00bear The Psychology of the Salem Witchcraft Excitement of 1692] (1882) *[https://archive.org/details/studyoftrancemus00bear Study of Trance, Muscle-Reading and Allied Nervous Phenomena in Europe and America, With a Letter on the Moral Character of Trance Subjects, and a Defence of Dr. Charcot] (1882) *[https://archive.org/details/salemwitchcraftp00stow The Salem Witchcraft: The Planchette Mystery: and Modern Spiritualism] (1886) References External links * * Category:1839 births Category:1883 deaths Category:American neurologists Category:American hypnotists Category:American Civil War surgeons Category:American military doctors Category:American skeptics Category:Anomalistic psychology Category:Critics of parapsychology Category:People from Montville, Connecticut Category:Yale University alumni Category:United States Navy personnel Category:Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons alumni